A Reproduction of Capitalist Realism

Gerhard Richter, Konrad Lueg, Sigmar Polke and Manfred Kuttner coined the term "Capitalist Realism" in Düsseldorf in 1963. This publication is the first dedicated to the phenomenon. The movement’s principal exhibitions and works are documented in reproductions of works and documents, plus critical essays.

Peter Fischli (born 1952) and David Weiss (1946–2012) collaborate to transform the stuff of ordinary life into a series of quizzical, whimsical, even disquieting encounters. Fascinated with unconventional subject matter and material, Fischli and Weiss toy with the idea of "high art," questioning popular narratives and movements in art and cultural history. Peter Fischli David Weiss presents an in-depth survey of the artists’ work from 1979 through 2012, drawn exclusively from Glenstone’s collection. The volume includes rubber and clay sculptures, photographic series including Equilibres (A Quiet Afternoon) and Sausage Series, digital slides such as Airports and Flowers and Mushrooms, stills from their acclaimed video The Way Things Go and the most recent iteration of their alter egos, Rat and Bear. Also reproduced is the artists’ most ambitious polyurethane installation, The Objects for Glenstone, and Questions, a slide installation of over 400 handwritten existential queries such as "Is the Devil a cheerful person?" and "Will happiness find me?" which won the Golden Lion Prize at the 2003 Venice Biennale.

British conceptual artist Simon Starling (born 1967) interrogates the histories of art and science, as well as other subjects such as economic and environmental issues, through a wide variety of media including film, installation and photography. Published for his first survey exhibition at a major American museum, Simon Starling: Metamorphology highlights a fundamental principle of Starling’s practice: an almost alchemistic conception of the transformative potential of art, or of transformation as art. The Turner Prize–winning artist’s working method constitutes recycling, both literally and figuratively: repurposing existing materials for new, artistic aims; retelling existing stories to produce new historical insights; linking, looping and remaking. This catalogue accompanies an exhibition organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in tandem with the Arts Club of Chicago, and features essays by MCA Chicago senior curator Dieter Roelstraete, Arts Club of Chicago executive director Janine Mileaf in collaboration with Simon Starling, and Tate Modern curator Mark Godfrey.

Power Plant Pages

Published by The Power Plant.Edited and with introduction by Melanie O'Brian. Text by Mark Godfrey, Eli Horwatt.

Speak, Memory is a critical reader accompanying Los Angeles-based Kerry Tribe’s (born 1973) exhibition at the Power Plant. It includes artwork reproductions, an annotated script from her film There Will Be _______(2012), as well as texts by Eli Horwatt, Mark Godfrey and Melanie O’Brian.

This intimate publication focuses on Frances Stark’s feature-length video “My Best Thing,” a digital video animation that traces the development of two sexual encounters into conversations about film, literature, art, collaboration and subjectivity. Mark Godfrey’s essay explores the artist’s use of online sex-chat rooms to generate material for the video.

Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York.Edited by Christian Rattemeyer, Lynne Cooke, Mark Godfrey. Text by Claire Gilman, Jason Smith.

Published to accompany the first large-scale retrospective of Alighiero Boetti's work outside Italy in over a decade, this volume presents the most comprehensive overview of the artist's career to date. Covering all periods of Boetti's broad oeuvre--including early sculptural experiments associated with the Arte Povera movement, conceptual and ephemeral projects of the 1970s and the monumental embroideries and tapestries he fabricated up to his death--this richly illustrated catalogue is structured as a typology of the artist's body of work rather than a chronological progression. Essays by curators from the Reina Sofia, Madrid, the Tate Modern, London and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, address recurrent themes in Boetti's work such as travel and geography, time, order and disorder and singularity and multitude, while contributions by scholars examine his early influences and his relationship to the cultural, political, and social spheres of Italy and Afghanistan in the 1970s and 1980s. This volume celebrates the material diversity, conceptual complexity and visual beauty of Boetti's work, proving that he is one of the most important and influential artists of his generation.

A Retrospective

Published on the occasion of Richter's major exhibition at the Tate, Gerhard Richter: Panorama is the first and most complete overview of one of the greatest artistic achievements of our times. Where previous monographs have focused on a single genre within the artist's vast output, this stunningly illustrated survey encompasses his entire oeuvre, now stretching across more than a half-century of activity, including photo-paintings, abstracts, landscapes and seascapes, portraits, glass and mirror works, sculptures, drawings and photographs. It therefore stands as the definitive portrait of Richter's colossal accomplishment to date. Alongside his celebrated abstractions, early black-and-white paintings and the photorealist depictions of candles, skulls and clouds that have become indisputable icons of modern painting, Panorama includes nearly 30 new paintings made over the past ten years, extensive comparative works, studio photographs, archival images and a substantial interview with the artist conducted by Nicholas Serota. This landmark publication is a fitting tribute to one of the world's most celebrated living artists. Born in Dresden, East Germany, in 1932, Gerhard Richter migrated to West Germany in 1961, settling in Düsseldorf, where he studied at the Düsseldorf Academy, and where he held his first solo exhibition in 1963. Over the course of that decade, Richter helped to liberate painting from the legacy of Socialist Realism (in Eastern Germany) and Abstract Expressionism (in Western Germany and throughout Europe). He has exhibited internationally for the last five decades, with retrospectives in New York, Paris and Düsseldorf. He lives and works in Cologne.

Published by Walther König, Köln.Foreword by Karola Kraus. Text by Mark Godfrey.

Christopher Williams began his career in the late 1980s appropriating advertising imagery; more recently he has begun to mimic such imagery himself, or at least adapt its capacity for pristine presentation and technical precision. Williams' prints of industrial products, animals, plants, modernist architecture and people pull the rug from under commercial photography with the lightest of tugs.

Working in a variety of media and a range of scales, from humble works on paper to monumental staged performances, Francis Al˙s (born 1959) has established himself as one of the world's leading contemporary artists. Based in Mexico City since 1986, the artist fashions much of his work from the street life he observes during long walks throughout the city. Bringing together a variety of participants, from Mexican sign-painters to British Guardsmen, his collaborations have produced several well-known works, including "When Faith Moves Mountains" (2002), in which he enlisted 500 volunteers to attempt to move a sand dune one foot from its original position using shovels, and "The Modern Procession" (2002), a ceremonial procession commemorating MoMA's temporary move to Queens, New York, that included a brass band and uniformed participants carrying reproductions of the Museum's most famous works across the Queensboro bridge. Published to accompany the largest retrospective of Al˙s' work to date, this publication is more a guidebook than a conventional monograph, reflecting the spirit of the artist's wandering practice. It features an introductory essay by Mark Godfrey, a curator at the Tate Modern, an index of quotes from Al˙s' previous writings and interviews compiled by Klaus Biesenbach, Director of P.S.1 Contemporary Arts Center, and descriptions of works written by Al˙s and Cuauhtémoc Medina, freelance curator and art critic, as well as responses to the artist's work from a wide range of critics and commentators.

For his installation Terminus, the British artist Darren Almond relocates 14 socialist-era bus stops from the Polish town of Oswiecim to a gallery space in Berlin, activating a force field between the Auschwitz concentration camp, everyday life in Oswiecim and the way we experience historical proximity or distance. As Julian Heynen writes in his analysis of Terminus: "What we see with our own eyes of the reality of Oswiecim, the bus shelters, is only a temporary stop on a hypothetical journey to the 'real' place, the camp. In this waiting room the direction of the next step is shown, even as doubt is cast on the chances of us satisfying our desire for authenticity." Mark Godfrey (Abstraction and the Holocaust) discusses the work's genesis and context in a conversation with Almond, while Charity Scribner (Requiem for Communism) introduces her personal experiences from Poland. An extensive photographic record draws together the many aspects of this installation, summarizing them in photo essays.

Dublin artist Gerard Byrne employs video and photography to question how images are constructed, transmitted and mediated. Influenced by literature and theater, Byrne’s work references everything from popular magazines to Samuel Beckett. This volume presents recent photographs and videos, along with works from the 2007 Venice Biennale.

Volume 79 of the influential international art journal Parkett features Jon Kessler, Marilyn Minter and Albert Oehlen. In the tinkered gadgetry of Kessler's retro sci-fi installations, we peek through surveillance cameras to see our own image among his analog programs crammed with detritus of all kinds. Kessler's vista of (d)evolved cyberstuff is in a manic state of accumulation, as this data-diving artist masters the ecology of pure information. Within Marilyn Minter's fetishistic, flawless pictures, we find a painter obsessed with the clear articulation of magnified sweat beads and pore-smeared glitter. In each successive lip-smacking painting, Minter sets out to perfect beauty's disguise, affirming both her pleasure in fashion imagery, and an appreciation of its vulgar mishaps--say, a drag queen's eyelashes clumped together with too much mascara. According to essayist John Kelsey, Albert Oehlen's collage-paintings "seem almost bored of their own shock-value." And yet this artist, one of the most significant German painters of the past 20 years, can make boredom look like a rigorous, if not delirious experiment. Also featured: Spencer Finch, Gelitin and Mark Wallinger, as well as essayists Paul Bonaventura, Mark Godfrey, Glenn O'Brien, Katy Siegel, Andrea Scott and Pamela Lee, to name a few.

This oversized catalogue, with deluxe flocking on the cover and throughout, collects representative works by the finalists for the 2006 Hugo Boss Prize: Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, John Bock, Tacita Dean, Damiįn Ortega, Aļda Ruilova and Tino Sehgal. The winner, Tacita Dean, received a solo show at the Guggenheim Museum this spring.

Published by Aperture.Edited by James Crump. Text by James Crump, Mark Godfrey, Thomas Seelig. Interview by Eva Respini.

Hugely influential among contemporary art photographers, James Welling has created beautiful and uncompromising photographs for more than 35 years. Operating in the hybrid ground between painting, sculpture and traditional photography, Welling is first and foremost a photographic practitioner enthralled with the possibilities of the medium. James Welling: Monograph provides the most thorough presentation of the artist’s work to date. Since the mid-1970s, Welling’s work has explored realism and transparency, abstraction and representation, optics and description, personal and cultural memory, and the material and chemical nature of photography. To date, the artist has been the subject of numerous catalogues addressing his more than 25 bodies of work. Yet no previous book has attempted to link these works and examine the primary threads that run through them all. Sumptuously produced, this volume presents a large selection of recent series, from 2000 through to the present, interspersed with important early and iconic works made in the preceding decades. James Crump, Chief Curator of the Cincinnati Art Museum contributes an extensive introductory essay. Also included are text contributions by Mark Godfrey and Thomas Seelig, plus an interview with Eva Respini, Associate Curator in the Department of Photography at MoMA.James Welling has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally. An earlier survey exhibition, James Welling: Photographs, 1974–1999, originated at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, and traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Baltimore Museum of Art. In 1999 he received the DG Bank-Forder Prize in Photography from the Sprengel Museum in Hannover, Germany. Solo exhibition venues include Regen Projects, Los Angeles; David Zwirner, New York; Maureen Paley, London; Galerie Nelson-Freeman, Paris; Wako Works of Art, Tokyo; Donald Young Gallery, Chicago, and Galerie Nächst St. Stephan, Vienna. Welling is professor in the UCLA Department of Art, where he has taught for more than 15 years, and a visiting professor at Princeton University.